The CS Is Running Out Of Resources...

[Killer Cyborg]

Regarding CS Technical Officers:

Keep in mind that they're an Adventuring Class, designed to be used as Player Characters. Yes, there could be adventures based entirely around activities in the Motor Pool, or about rare excursions out of the Motor Pool, but the more likely scenario is that these guys do go on "adventures," and see combat.
Engineers do more than repair stuff in a garage, after all.

SB1 29 lists a standard Special Forces Espionage Elite unit, and it includes "Major Psionic Technical Officer," whose "area of expertise is usually Communications, Engineering, or Weapons.

Standard equipment includes body armor, weapons, grenades, survival knives, and so forth--the general compliment of gear that any front-line soldier tends to have.

[Killer Cyborg]

It sounds to me like you are the one who does not understand those things, so prehaps we should agree to disagree.

I understand them pretty darned well.
More sick people requires a heck of a lot more doctors than virtually no sick people.
Same with machines.
You've made claims to the counter, but you haven't followed them up with anything substantial.

But yes, if you see no way to move the conversation forward from here, there's no need to keep restating our positions.

[Nekira Sudacne]

It sounds to me like you are the one who does not understand those things, so prehaps we should agree to disagree.

I understand them pretty darned well.
More sick people requires a heck of a lot more doctors than virtually no sick people.
Same with machines.
You've made claims to the counter, but you haven't followed them up with anything substantial.

But yes, if you see no way to move the conversation forward from here, there's no need to keep restating our positions.

Not so much as I see no way to move it forward so much as I don't have the time or energy to engage in the lengthy discussions a full analasis of logistics and mangement and automation and computerization the way this argument would need to be.

That's part of why you see me participating in arguments less and less these days. Not that I CAN'T persue the arguments, I just don't have the time/energy for them I used to. If your not willing to take my word for it, I don't have 10 hours with which to convince you i'm right and you're wrong

[Killer Cyborg]

It sounds to me like you are the one who does not understand those things, so prehaps we should agree to disagree.

I understand them pretty darned well.
More sick people requires a heck of a lot more doctors than virtually no sick people.
Same with machines.
You've made claims to the counter, but you haven't followed them up with anything substantial.

But yes, if you see no way to move the conversation forward from here, there's no need to keep restating our positions.

Not so much as I see no way to move it forward so much as I don't have the time or energy to engage in the lengthy discussions a full analasis of logistics and mangement and automation and computerization the way this argument would need to be.

That's part of why you see me participating in arguments less and less these days. Not that I CAN'T persue the arguments, I just don't have the time/energy for them I used to. If your not willing to take my word for it, I don't have 10 hours with which to convince you i'm right and you're wrong

I hear ya.
I'm in the same boat.

[Killer Cyborg]

Meanwhile, I revisited the CS views on robots (SB1 54), and it's not as bad as I remembered.
The CS doesn't want anybody owning robots in their cities, but apparently it's often okay within CS territory overall, and there is no mention of the CS government and/or military (who "dominates and controls the use, operation, and manufacturing of robots...within the states") being opposed to using robots themselves.
The concerns mentioned about Skelebots (SB1 31-33) are predominantly about the bots running amok and killing innocent humans, but that seems like more of a concern about Skelebots specifically, since they're soldiers.
It mentions on SB1 45 that "The CS have authorized the imporation of [Dyna-Bot] labor units, not realizing that the bots are identical [to the combat versions] except for programming."
This indicates that their concerns about robots are mostly about combat robots.

Which means that any number of robots could be employed by the CS military to reduce the Tail.

SB1 97 describes the "General Robot Skill Program" for non-combat robots.
It includes:
Radio Basic 98%
Pilot Auto 94%
Land Navigation 94%
Speak American/Spanish/Euro 94%
And "The bot can identify and use (to some extent) the thousands of everyday tools, appliances, weapons, armor, robots, and vehicles found in the human communities."

Without any additional programming, robots could act as drivers, translators, guides, and general servants.
With additional programming, they can do almost any non-combat function that doesn't require actual sapience.
They can have any Domestic skill at 94%, for example. That covers a lot of variety in skills, and they perform at a MUCH hire skill level than humans do.
Electrical and Mechanical skills? Also 94%. A human Electrical Engineer would have to be 13th level to be that good (not counting possible OCC bonuses, but still).
Paramedic? 80%. Same with pathology and forensics.
Communications skills? Again, 94%.

Looking at it, there are MANY military non-combat jobs that could be filled with robots.

[Pepsi Jedi]

I always though population levels and resources needed a bigger focus in RIFTS. The Lonestar book if you add up the population levels for everywhere in the book its higher then modern texas.

That is a common problem within Rifts. The CS, for example, has a fraction of the population of the real world USA. Their standing military (pre-HoH) has 5,000,000 combat troops. The US military has 1.6 million people in it. Of those 1.6 million less than 200,000 are actual combat forces.

The numbers of troops, populations, and such often don't work out with the math.

Think not so much the US military as places like north korea or isreal. Places where they are small countries with a lot of foes so basically nearly every able bodied adult goes through the military for at least a few years. The US tends to not maintain that much of a standing army because we project enough power over seas there is no real need for us to set up sizable garrisons on our own soil. If monsters literally were real and could appear anywhere at any time I guarantee you the government would bolster the size of the military really damn quick.

You're missing the point. 5,000,000 combat troops. In real life that would require an army of around 50,000,000 the CS doesn't even have 50,000,000 citizens. Remember there are lots and lots of non-combat personnel in every military. We are told the CS has 5,000,000 combat personnel.

The fact is, as stated, numbers and populations never work in Rifts.

The thing is that rifts military might not need a 10 to 1 ratio. With mega damage materials alot of the rear escelon jobs wouldn't be needed. And it could very much be like a 'Starship troopers' Mentality. In the CS "EVERYONE" Fights, from the cook to the Chaplin to the Genreals secretary.

Yes it takes the US a large force to deploy and what not but in a sci fi army it might not. They might all deploy and fight.

Edit: Annnnnd.. I see others have made the arguement much more deeply than I chose to today. lol. Good job. *Nods*

[HWalsh]

Killer Cyborg, it's what the military calls the "Tooth to Tail" ratio. "Tooth" (combat troops) to "tail" (Support personell and noncombat troops). Every full time infantryman requires, depending on the military structure, 6-10 times as many noncombat personell to support them.

Basically, the noncombat jobs in the military always outnumber combat. You need support and logistics, you need technical and engineering personell, you need support and medical personell, you need procurement and logistics personell, you need trainers, and each and every one of those requires their own support and command structures.

I've already addressed all of that.
If you have anything specific that you feel hasn't been addressed, bring up the specific point.

Given the presumed lack of wear and tear on MDC machinery (Not zero--it's mentioned in a few places that MDC suits need maitance occasionally, but nowhere near as often--prehaps SDC electronics need repairing?), and given theoretically super advanced manufacturing, you could possibly cut that down to at as little as 1:4 ratio, but you would still be talking about an army of 20 million to support 5 million combat troops.

Good start...
Add in the superior organizational power of computers.
Add in the element of psychics.
Add in people not getting sick as a rule, to the point where even obesity is unheard of.
Add in repair nanites.
Add in a LOT of stuff that the Romans didn't have, and we don't have today.

There's a pretty harsh limit to the amount of automation. all those things you mention make doing the job easier for each individual involved, but that only reduces the need for warm bodies to USE those tools so much. if you need 50 million support personel, but all those tools allow one man to do the work of 3 support personell, then you still need 16.66 million people not-fighting.

If you don't need 50 million support personnel, and all those tools (and factors) allow one man to do the work of 100, then what?

How many medics/doctors does an army need if it never gets sick?
How many people does a motor pool need if vehicles don't break down?
How many bureaucrats does an army need in a society where computers are advanced enough that popular literacy is no longer needed?

Figure out the answer to those questions, and you'll have a starting idea of the ratio the CS would be looking at.

People may not get sick but they do get injured. They suffer PTSD. They see horrible monsters and such after all.

Vehicles may not suffer wear and tear but they still break down when struck by an MDC weapon. The radios aren't MDC either. Armor has holes that need to be patched.

Literacy isn't needed but you need a lot of people to run propaganda, not to mention produce content, especially since you can't let them do it themselves without monitoring it.

You also need an entertainment department for the military. People forget that such is a thing. USO shows and such take, and require, military personnel.

You need non-combat personnel to look through every single letter sent home by every single soldier to redact every single mention of something the military doesn't want leaked. (That we know is a thing because of the fiction from the SoT series concerning letters from the front.)

You also need accountants, to pay people. Beurocratic the catalog material. You need a lot of people for every fighting man.

[Killer Cyborg]

People may not get sick but they do get injured.

Sure, but not very often if they're wearing MDC armor.
And mostly only if you're using Optional rules.
And when/if they DO get injured, they can slap on some Knitters or an IRMSS kit themselves. Or the Grunt next to them can do it.

They suffer PTSD. They see horrible monsters and such after all.

I gotta give this one to you; PTSD might well be higher in Rifts Earth than it is now, so they might need more shrinks.
But there's nothing saying that would offset all the other reductions in Tail.

Vehicles may not suffer wear and tear but they still break down when struck by an MDC weapon.

Yup. Definitely.
I'm not saying that the army wouldn't need ANY mechanics, just that the majority of the Motor Pool's responsibilities today would no longer be necessary.

The radios aren't MDC either.

Possibly.

Literacy isn't needed but you need a lot of people to run propaganda, not to mention produce content, especially since you can't let them do it themselves without monitoring it.

I'm not sure that you DO need a lot of people to run propaganda.
But I'm also not sure that the propaganda department is considered to be part of the military's Tail.

You also need an entertainment department for the military.

Robots can sing and dance at 94%.
VR computers could make up a lot of R&R and other entertainment as well.

You need non-combat personnel to look through every single letter sent home by every single soldier to redact every single mention of something the military doesn't want leaked. (That we know is a thing because of the fiction from the SoT series concerning letters from the front.)

A computer could do that easily. We know that they have computers that can read, because they have them in every suit of EBA these days.

You also need accountants, to pay people.

Computers.

Beurocratic the catalog material.

Computers.

You need a lot of people for every fighting man.

Not so much in the face of future technology.

[HWalsh]

People may not get sick but they do get injured.

Sure, but not very often if they're wearing MDC armor.
And mostly only if you're using Optional rules.
And when/if they DO get injured, they can slap on some Knitters or an IRMSS kit themselves. Or the Grunt next to them can do it.

They suffer PTSD. They see horrible monsters and such after all.

I gotta give this one to you; PTSD might well be higher in Rifts Earth than it is now, so they might need more shrinks.
But there's nothing saying that would offset all the other reductions in Tail.

Vehicles may not suffer wear and tear but they still break down when struck by an MDC weapon.

Yup. Definitely.
I'm not saying that the army wouldn't need ANY mechanics, just that the majority of the Motor Pool's responsibilities today would no longer be necessary.

The radios aren't MDC either.

Possibly.

Literacy isn't needed but you need a lot of people to run propaganda, not to mention produce content, especially since you can't let them do it themselves without monitoring it.

I'm not sure that you DO need a lot of people to run propaganda.
But I'm also not sure that the propaganda department is considered to be part of the military's Tail.

It is in the real world.

You also need an entertainment department for the military.

Robots can sing and dance at 94%.
VR computers could make up a lot of R&R and other entertainment as well.

The CS would NOT be okay with that. The robots I mean. They didn't even want people being around Skelebots. They would be taking serious risk at "humanizing" robots. They don't even like that the men have embraced dog boys.

Also, you need your living people. VR only goes so far. The men, and women, usually don't go to the USO show just to watch the dancing. That part doesn't work so well with robots.

You need non-combat personnel to look through every single letter sent home by every single soldier to redact every single mention of something the military doesn't want leaked. (That we know is a thing because of the fiction from the SoT series concerning letters from the front.)

A computer could do that easily. We know that they have computers that can read, because they have them in every suit of EBA these days.

Read isn't the right word. They are video letters and no, the CS probably can't make a computer that can do that. The computer would need a complex enough AI to understand context in human conversation. ARCHIE Three could do it, but you'd need a level well beyond what the CS has demonstrated.

You also need accountants, to pay people.

Computers.

Nope. Computers can only work as well as the person putting info into them. You need data entry.

Beurocratic the catalog material.

Computers.

See above.

You need a lot of people for every fighting man.

Not so much in the face of future technology.

[/quote]

You might need less, but stepping away from the conventional 9:1 you're not getting that number below 4:1 it will never happen and that's really generous.

At 4:1 you're still talking about more than 50% of the population, which includes the elderly, the mentally unfit, the physically unfit, and children, serving in the CS military.

That was when the CS only had 5,000,000 troops.

Balloon to 9,000,000 and it gets nuts.

[Killer Cyborg]

I'm not sure that you DO need a lot of people to run propaganda.
But I'm also not sure that the propaganda department is considered to be part of the military's Tail.

It is in the real world.

Interesting.
Again, there's not anything that necessarily requires the CS propaganda department to be large enough to make up for the lack of Tail in other areas.

You also need an entertainment department for the military.

Robots can sing and dance at 94%.
VR computers could make up a lot of R&R and other entertainment as well.

The CS would NOT be okay with that. The robots I mean. They didn't even want people being around Skelebots. They would be taking serious risk at "humanizing" robots. They don't even like that the men have embraced dog boys.

I kind of thought the same thing, until I reread SB1. I couldn't find anything prohibiting this kind of thing.
Yes, they did worry that their robots who were programmed to be death machines might run amok, BUT there's no expression of similar concern over non-combat robots.

Also, you need your living people. VR only goes so far. The men, and women, usually don't go to the USO show just to watch the dancing. That part doesn't work so well with robots.

Sure, you need some living people. Just nowhere near as many as we need today.

You need non-combat personnel to look through every single letter sent home by every single soldier to redact every single mention of something the military doesn't want leaked. (That we know is a thing because of the fiction from the SoT series concerning letters from the front.)

A computer could do that easily. We know that they have computers that can read, because they have them in every suit of EBA these days.

Read isn't the right word. They are video letters and no, the CS probably can't make a computer that can do that. The computer would need a complex enough AI to understand context in human conversation. ARCHIE Three could do it, but you'd need a level well beyond what the CS has demonstrated.[/quote]

You don't need to do all of that to look for key words or phrases. You don't need somebody to go over each and ever video-letter; you need somebody to go over each and every video-letter that gets flagged by the computers.
BIG difference.

You also need accountants, to pay people.

Computers.

Nope. Computers can only work as well as the person putting info into them. You need data entry.

Not a significant amount when it comes to paychecks.
You think they don't have direct deposit?
Sure, new accounts would need to be set up here or there. There would need to be some kind of payroll department, BUT one heck of a lot of it could easily be automated.

Beurocratic the catalog material.

Computers.

See above.

Seen it.
Still computers. No, they wouldn't need to necessarily replace every job, but they could replace a lot of them, probably most.
Especially when you bring robots into the mix.

You might need less, but stepping away from the conventional 9:1 you're not getting that number below 4:1 it will never happen and that's really generous.

I disagree.
I think that 4:1 is far too high, and I've explained my reasoning pretty thoroughly.

Every time I've pointed out where huge numbers of Tail personnel could possibly be eliminated, the response has essentially been "well, not all of them would be eliminated," which doesn't counter the point.
Pepsi and I have raised the point that the CS military might be better at multi-functioning roles, where the people who DO perform the Tail duties are still used in combat, and no real response has occurred to that point either.

[HWalsh]

Every time I've pointed out where huge numbers of Tail personnel could possibly be eliminated, the response has essentially been "well, not all of them would be eliminated," which doesn't counter the point.
Pepsi and I have raised the point that the CS military might be better at multi-functioning roles, where the people who DO perform the Tail duties are still used in combat, and no real response has occurred to that point either.

I have to ask you. How much actual military experience do you have?

I ask because I have some, and I grew up in a military household, my father is a Veteran, I enlisted when I was 17 (though I was medically discharged) and I'm a real-world game designer. (Video games and simulations)

You are posting all of these ways that, "Well it could be reduced." That I know, for a fact, have been tried in real life and they were found unworkable or created as many problems as they solved.

Things like, "You only need the computer to flag the speech and then a human has to review it."

That sounds nice on paper, in practice there would be impossible logistic issues with trying it.

Here is why:

Lets say that you try to program a computer to look for, "Flagged speech."

Unless you were incredibly specific you are going to get tons and tons of false flags. Which requires more humans. Then you have to constantly have programmers update it for "slang" as well. Then if you are specific then it is going to be ineffective.

Here is an example of speech that would contain redacted information:

"Me and my boys joined up with Alpha and went up the hill near Tolkeen's left flank. You wouldn't believe it, there were at least three dozen of 'em. Demons! We were lucky that we had our new rifles with us or we'd never have made it out of there. I love you so much, give my love to the kids."

Obviously you don't want the words "joined" or "Left Flank" to be in there. You need to check, "Believe" because it could contradict CS propaganda. You want the computer to check the words "Three Dozen" because that could pertain to your own troop numbers, in context it is fine but the computer can't determine that. "Demons!" You want censored because it could insight panic. "New rifles" should be censored because it could pertain to weapons that the enemy can't know about.

So, if all of that is redacted the letter looks like this:

"Me and my boys *redacted* up with alpha and went up the hill near Tolkeen's *redacted*. You wouldn't *redacted* it, there were at least *redacted* of 'em. *redacted*! We were lucky that we had our *redacted* with us or we'd never have made it out of there. I love you so much, give my love to the kids."

Note that some of this would be un-redacted by hand because the system can only flag, not interpret context.

Now, using just that same set of words here is another letter:

"Hi Linda! I got your last video and I couldn't believe how big Jessica is getting. Tell Donnie to keep practicing with his rifle, I know he plans on joining up when he turns 17 and I can tell you, he won't make the cut if he still shoots like he did when we were kids. How long have we been talking like this? I've sent at least a dozen of these video letters. I can't wait to see you in person again. I love you honey."

It becomes:

"Hi Linda! I got your last video and I couldn't *redacted* how big Jessica is getting. Tell Donnie to keep practicing with his *redacted*, I know he plans on *redacted* up when he turns 17 and I can tell you, he won't make the cut if he still shoots like he did when we were kids. How long have we been talking like this? I've sent at least *redacted* of these video letters. I can't wait to see you in person again. I love you honey."

Though there is nothing in here that needs to be censored. So the computer flags it, a specialist looks at it, then has to unflag all of it. Then processes it. The problem is, no matter what, the computer is going to flag just about every letter. If the computer is going to do that then you may as well have a person do it. I KNOW this happens because I have seen it first hand.

[Killer Cyborg]

Every time I've pointed out where huge numbers of Tail personnel could possibly be eliminated, the response has essentially been "well, not all of them would be eliminated," which doesn't counter the point.
Pepsi and I have raised the point that the CS military might be better at multi-functioning roles, where the people who DO perform the Tail duties are still used in combat, and no real response has occurred to that point either.

I have to ask you. How much actual military experience do you have?

None.

I ask because I have some, and I grew up in a military household, my father is a Veteran, I enlisted when I was 17 (though I was medically discharged) and I'm a real-world game designer. (Video games and simulations)

You are posting all of these ways that, "Well it could be reduced." That I know, for a fact, have been tried in real life and they were found unworkable or created as many problems as they solved.

Cool.
Kindly cite your sources for the times the US military (or any other military) has, in real life:
a) Using computers that are 100x more powerful than the modern equivalent.
b) Using a population that effectively doesn't get sick.
c) Using soldiers who wear body armor that prevent virtually all non-fatal damage and injury
d) Using vehicles that do literally not suffer from wear and tear, nor--as a rule--any damage outside of combat or catastrophic high-speed crashes.
Edit: And, for that matter, that effectively do not need to refuel.
e) Using AI robots that can perform complex skills out of the box, at a level of proficiency that surpasses most human experts.

Things like, "You only need the computer to flag the speech and then a human has to review it."

That sounds nice on paper, in practice there would be impossible logistic issues with trying it.

Here is why:

Lets say that you try to program a computer to look for, "Flagged speech."

Unless you were incredibly specific you are going to get tons and tons of false flags. Which requires more humans.

More humans than checking every single "letter" home in the first place?
How do you figure?

Then you have to constantly have programmers update it for "slang" as well. Then if you are specific then it is going to be ineffective.

Gee. You have to have a tech somewhere come up with occasional patches. Hey, maybe it's a dozen techs.
Or maybe it's one robot with the Computer Programming skill, who never has to sleep, never tires, and never needs to take a break.
Or maybe it's a dozen robots, or a hundred. Or a hundred robots and a hundred techs.
It's not going to be anywhere near what we'd need today in order to do the same thing.

Here is an example of speech that would contain redacted information:

"Me and my boys joined up with Alpha and went up the hill near Tolkeen's left flank. You wouldn't believe it, there were at least three dozen of 'em. Demons! We were lucky that we had our new rifles with us or we'd never have made it out of there. I love you so much, give my love to the kids."

Obviously you don't want the words "joined" or "Left Flank" to be in there. You need to check, "Believe" because it could contradict CS propaganda. You want the computer to check the words "Three Dozen" because that could pertain to your own troop numbers, in context it is fine but the computer can't determine that. "Demons!" You want censored because it could insight panic. "New rifles" should be censored because it could pertain to weapons that the enemy can't know about.

a) Don't confuse your personal idea of what the CS might censor with what the CS would actually censor.
b) We already have programs that are able to deal to a minor degree with contextual locations of words. The CS stuff would be 100x better as a rule. You know programming and computers, so seriously take a long hard think about the implications of that.
Take the best stuff in the world today, and it's 1/100th of the best stuff the CS has to bring to bear on a problem, computer-wise. That's the general rule, not including stuff like AIs that operate out of the box with skills like Cryptography and Intelligence at 80%.
A human being with the Cryptography skill would have to be 12th level or so to match that level of skill.
An Intelligence operative would have to be about 13th level.
c) Since they're video "letters," if I have you right, then tone of voice and other factors could be factored in as well.

[Killer Cyborg]

http://www.lancerpublishers.com/Maj%20G ... 0Suman.pdf

THE US EXPERIENCE
Maj Gen Mrinal Suman

It is generally agreed that the US
military had ‘teeth to tail ratio’ of 1:1
during the Cold War period. Due to
comparatively higher reduction in
combat troops subsequently, the
ratio has further tilted in favour of the
tail. The current estimates put it at
3:7 to 2:11. This figure is for the US
forces as a whole and varies across
different constituents - certain high-
tech arms are stated to have a ratio
of 1:11.

Edit:
http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/d ... h_op23.pdf

Chapter 2
Historical Experience
World War I
Theater Level
When the United States entered World War I, its Army had had only
limited experience with expeditionary warfare and no experience in the
type of warfare being fought in France. Accordingly, the types of support
units needed in France were created from scratch. American planners
made force development estimates based on the general principles found
in the Army’s field service regulations and from looking at the example of
the composition of the French and British forces (Figure 2). The early T3R
projection was that support elements would be 20 percent (or a ratio of 4:1
combat versus support) of the expeditionary force. But, as the organization
developed, this percentage estimate was increased in September 1917 to
33 percent (or a ratio of 2:1 combat versus support).
1

According to the Army’s Active Army Troop List, dated 31 March
1974, there were 186,822 troop positions authorized in Germany. This
allotment of soldiers consisted of an authorized 51,170 combat troops
(27 percent), 70,455 headquarters or headquarters support personnel (38
percent) and 65,094 positions (35 percent) for logistical or life support
type positions (Figure 24). 39

Congress required reductions in the 73 percent which did not consist
of combat elements. The Nunn Amendment allowed for two courses of
action: the elimination of the 12,175 noncombat positions outright or their
replacement by combat positions. Both actions had to be completed within
2 years. Naturally, the Army chose the latter and instituted the short-lived
Brigade-75 and Brigade-76 programs to produce the lion’s share of the
positions. 40
With these two choices, the Nunn Amendment’s provisions provided a tooth-to-tail spread allowing combat elements to be between
29 and 34 percent of the total organization in Europe (Figure 25). This
yielded ratios between combat and noncombat forces of 1 to 2.4 and 1 to
1.9. Congress, accordingly, in 1974 considered an acceptable tooth-to-tail
ratio to be roughly two noncombat soldiers for every combat soldier.

Summary
This work examined the major US Army overseas deployments since
World War I and analyzed them in terms of the tooth-to-tail ratio—the pro-
portion of combat troops to noncombat troops—at two levels: the opera-
tional T3R (proportion of divisions and brigades in the whole Army) and
at the tactical level, the functional T3R, which divided Army units into cat-
egories by function and determined the proportions. Interestingly enough,
the average historical proportion of combat forces for both the operation-
al and functional T3Rs were the same: 32.5 percent of the total force.

[HWalsh]

Cyborg, you know that the 1:11 is 1 fighting man to 11 non-fighting men... Right? In that first statement about the US.

Your second and third comment pertain specifically to "overseas deployment" which has a lower tail ratio because they are receiving state-side support and logistics.

[Killer Cyborg]

Cyborg, you know that the 1:11 is 1 fighting man to 11 non-fighting men... Right? In that first statement about the US.

Yup.
And the part that I bolded is a 1:1 ratio.

Your second and third comment pertain specifically to "overseas deployment" which has a lower tail ratio because they are receiving state-side support and logistics.

Yup.
But it shows how the numbers can be moved around depending on circumstances, and depending on how and what you are counting.
When Palladium says "x million soldiers," it's not usually clear what exactly they're talking about, and the lines between Tooth and Tail can get blurred or changed depending on how you count things.
The third comment illustrates a real-world example of combat troops filling the role of non-combat troops, thus increasing the Tooth to Tail ratio, for example.

If you have better numbers on the overall military Tooth to Tail ratio, PLEASE present them.
This was the best I could do so far.

[eliakon]

So if I am reading this right and the CS is as good as the US was at its heyday...
Then they could have a ratio around 1:1 or 2:1
Which would mean that of their 5-9m soldiers somewhere around 2-5m of them are not "tooth" but the logistical support side of the army.
Which means that the CS does not have a field army of 9m troops... they have a Total Department of Defense that is 9m strong, but might only put 3-5m in the field (including all non-pure support roles so that includes officers, psychics, combat medics, line unit level maintainer/supply etc.)

[Killer Cyborg]

So if I am reading this right and the CS is as good as the US was at its heyday...
Then they could have a ratio around 1:1 or 2:1
Which would mean that of their 5-9m soldiers somewhere around 2-5m of them are not "tooth" but the logistical support side of the army.
Which means that the CS does not have a field army of 9m troops... they have a Total Department of Defense that is 9m strong, but might only put 3-5m in the field (including all non-pure support roles so that includes officers, psychics, combat medics, line unit level maintainer/supply etc.)

I don't have the book describing the 9 million number, so I don't know what it's intended to describe, or whether Palladium described it well.
I also don't have hard numbers on the current CS population, and I don't know if the numbers that I DO have (SB1) include the military or not, and what exactly it does include.

IF the CS has 9 million Combat Troops, and IF they've achieved a 2:1 or 1:1 ratio, then that means that they also have 4.5 million-9 million additional Non-Combat Troops.
Maybe.

[Pepsi Jedi]

((replying to the post before KC's. )

Eli, There's no evidence of that.

Modern armed forces are reducing their' tooth to tail' ratio in a simple way.

They have soldiers for the soldiering. And the jobs that can be carried out by civilians are being carried out by civilians.

The CS, being on constant war footing could be doing this to an extreme.

The mechanics? NOT IN THE ARMY. They're independant civilian contractors that build maintain and repair the CS fighting vechiles.
The Doctors? NOT IN THE ARMY. They're medical elite that are civilians that work for the army. Putting the troops back together. (And for a point of fact. HoH Says that someone with 40 or 60% of their body blown away can be saved on the battle field (I don't remember if it's 60 or 40.. it's one of those though I think) That someone with thatm uch of their body simply GONE due to mega damage can be stablized and brought back to base. The CS's Medical stuff is FRIGGING AMAZING.. even though we dont have it 'detailed')
The people making the food. NOT IN THE ARMY. (Though the CS Cookie was fun, it's not cannon.) They have guys that feed the army. The US armed forces are going this way ourselves.

The CS might honestly front THAT MANY Combat troops. Their entire society is coached around supporting the military that keeps them safe. This would be one way the country maintains it's footing in such a way. Those people at aren't IN the military, often have jobs that support the military.

Many of the people in our modern military aren't 'combat troops'. The CS might excise those people and retain them under civilian contract. Every CS Soldier might be honest to goddess front line unit. Standing to, and paroling, doing military duty every day.

The "REMF" might all be civilians. Freeing up every CS soldier to fight.

You have to remember the setting in which the CS exists. There's nothing in the books that state this ins't an option, and nothing in the book that states the vast vast majority of the CS troops are busy peeling patatos while a small percentage fight.

[taalismn]

I figure that the CS LIKES to think that it can get 100% 'everybody fights' mobilization from its military, especially on the defensive, where teleporting monsters rather blows the idea of 'safe deep within our lines' clear out of the water, and so they train all their recruits to at least know which end of the guns to point away from themselves, but in an actual combat situation suddenly thrust upon them? Oh, there will be those support echelon troops who will shine, like in the Battle of the Bulge, but unless the situation is right near their homesteads, there's going to be a fair amount of panic, especially among the arcology-born who have been manning desks all this time in the service, periodic 'know your enemy' demos aside. I figure the percentage will be closer to 60-70%, which is still pretty awesome efficient, but still leaves a good chunk of personnel who are going to either panicking or dithering, or essentially useless as combatants unless quickly commissar'ed into position and faced with a dead end and nothing to hide behind.

[HWalsh]

So if I am reading this right and the CS is as good as the US was at its heyday...
Then they could have a ratio around 1:1 or 2:1
Which would mean that of their 5-9m soldiers somewhere around 2-5m of them are not "tooth" but the logistical support side of the army.
Which means that the CS does not have a field army of 9m troops... they have a Total Department of Defense that is 9m strong, but might only put 3-5m in the field (including all non-pure support roles so that includes officers, psychics, combat medics, line unit level maintainer/supply etc.)

No. Cyborg is stating overseas numbers which are totally not applicable to the CS situation on the main NA continent.

In the US we have a 1:11 Tooth:Tail ratio.

Overseas they get it lower because they have US-side support staff.

The best number for at home Tooth:Tail was Rome, getting to 1:3 but that isn't a legitimate number because they used slaves to fill tail roles. It was actually 1:6.

The realistically lowest you could go would be 1:4, which is almost 1/3 of what the US uses which is REALLY good. 1:1 is unheard of and has never been pulled off without having a much larger "tail" in another country supplying them.

If we allow the CS to somehow magically get 1:2 Tooth:Tail (which is more efficient than any military in history) then it means that the CS would have to have a total population of 27,000,000 people doing JUST jobs for the CS Military. Since we know the CS has around 35,000,000-45,000,000 people in it. That means that there are 8,000,000-18,000,000 people in the CS who aren't working for the CS military, and that 8,000,000 includes children and those unable or unwilling to serve. That is actually pretty ridiculous as a number.

Here is why...

Usually around 1/2 of your population are children (under the age of 18) or the elderly (over the age of 50) meaning if the CS has 45,000,000 people then we can safely assume that 22,500,000 people are fit to serve. So, using the incredibly low 1:2 those numbers still don't work.

Its not a really big deal. We always knew that NONE of the population numbers in Rifts work. They are always higher than they should be.

[Killer Cyborg]

So if I am reading this right and the CS is as good as the US was at its heyday...
Then they could have a ratio around 1:1 or 2:1
Which would mean that of their 5-9m soldiers somewhere around 2-5m of them are not "tooth" but the logistical support side of the army.
Which means that the CS does not have a field army of 9m troops... they have a Total Department of Defense that is 9m strong, but might only put 3-5m in the field (including all non-pure support roles so that includes officers, psychics, combat medics, line unit level maintainer/supply etc.)

No. Cyborg is stating overseas numbers which are totally not applicable to the CS situation on the main NA continent.

In the US we have a 1:11 Tooth:Tail ratio.

Uh... not quite.
The same source that I posted which gives the 1:11 ratio currently also gave us a 1:1 ratio during the Cold War.
The second source that I provided was discussing specifically overseas, but it gave different numbers entirely.

The best number for at home Tooth:Tail was Rome, getting to 1:3 but that isn't a legitimate number because they used slaves to fill tail roles. It was actually 1:6.

Source?

The realistically lowest you could go would be 1:4,

Source?

1:1 is unheard of and has never been pulled off without having a much larger "tail" in another country supplying them.

Source?

Since we know the CS has around 35,000,000-45,000,000 people in it.

Source?

[Killer Cyborg]

Here's another link:

Cites modern US military Tooth to Tail as 1:11, WWI as 1:4, and Civil War (Union) as 1:3.


Oh, and here's another:
http://magiclougie.blogspot.com/2015/07 ... rfare.html

There's a concept called tooth-to-tail ratio, which is the ratio of soldiers directly involved in fighting missions (tooth) to those involved in supporting activities (tail). A typical ratio is about 1/3 tooth to 2/3 tail, which means that you're spending a lot of resources on logistics, supplies, and other efforts to support the actual combat operations.

According to Gen. Cole, the Army sees that as an opportunity to become more efficient:
"Maybe it’s one-half to one-half," he said. "The point is you get to keep more tooth, more folks that actually conduct operations on the ground and less supporting structure."
And one way of becoming more efficient is by using support robots—a trend we're seeing not only in the Army but other U.S. armed forces as well. Robots will likely include autonomous vehicles that can transport supplies, autonomous aircraft that can transport supplies, and other autonomous robots that can transport supplies (like the LS3 "robot mule," pictured below). As you may have noticed, there's a theme here, but most of those support robot programs are in the early stages and whether they'll prove effective, only time will tell.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122721015509345161

There have been military forces in history which had virtually no "tail" at all. Two notable examples of that are the Mongols and the Zulus. The Zulu army traveled on foot, and the soldiers carried only their spears and shields, because they would be fed by the local villagers wherever they were. The Mongol force was entirely mounted, but its horses could refuel on grass and the men mostly got their food by hunting or foraging.

[HWalsh]

So if I am reading this right and the CS is as good as the US was at its heyday...
Then they could have a ratio around 1:1 or 2:1
Which would mean that of their 5-9m soldiers somewhere around 2-5m of them are not "tooth" but the logistical support side of the army.
Which means that the CS does not have a field army of 9m troops... they have a Total Department of Defense that is 9m strong, but might only put 3-5m in the field (including all non-pure support roles so that includes officers, psychics, combat medics, line unit level maintainer/supply etc.)

No. Cyborg is stating overseas numbers which are totally not applicable to the CS situation on the main NA continent.

In the US we have a 1:11 Tooth:Tail ratio.

Uh... not quite.
The same source that I posted which gives the 1:11 ratio currently also gave us a 1:1 ratio during the Cold War.
The second source that I provided was discussing specifically overseas, but it gave different numbers entirely.

The best number for at home Tooth:Tail was Rome, getting to 1:3 but that isn't a legitimate number because they used slaves to fill tail roles. It was actually 1:6.

Source?

The realistically lowest you could go would be 1:4,

Source?

1:1 is unheard of and has never been pulled off without having a much larger "tail" in another country supplying them.

Source?

Since we know the CS has around 35,000,000-45,000,000 people in it.

Source?

Are you...

*sigh*

Source: Military History, I can't reference the text books and studies I read 15 years ago.

The Cold War was so low Tooth:Tail because our deployment numbers were incredibly low. It was a COLD war after all. Most of the activities carried out at the time weren't US military they were CIA and/or small logistics.

If 1:1 was possible IN A HOME COUNTRY then we would SEE IT in home countries. We ONLY see those numbers abroad. The government is all about saving money if DARPA (who actually does try to increase efficiency in Tooth:Tail as an ongoing thing) could get it below 1:11 in the US then they would have already done it.

If you want me to source that 1:1 isn't possible in a home country, then I want you to source somewhere WITH A MODERN ARMY with no amendments (such as the CIA doing most of the US logistics work during the Cold War) pick any country, right now, any modern country that we can trust the information from (IE not North Korea) that has a 1:1. You can't. Especially again, since we have a freaking 1:11 here.

I'm granting you 1:2 as a courtesy, which is IMPOSSIBLY good, and you are wanting to push for 1:1 or 1:0.5 to try to make the numbers work.

So... Since I can't (and I am not going to spend hours digging through things) find those numbers you want to source... I'll concede you the point... As ridiculous as it is... That the CS somehow has a better than 1:1 ratio and therefor their massive 5,000,000+ combat force army is "logical"

[Killer Cyborg]

So... Since I can't (and I am not going to spend hours digging through things) find those numbers you want to source... I'll concede you the point... As ridiculous as it is... That the CS somehow has a better than 1:1 ratio and therefor their massive 5,000,000+ combat force army is "logical"

I wasn't going for "logical," only "possible."
But thanks.

[HWalsh]

So... Since I can't (and I am not going to spend hours digging through things) find those numbers you want to source... I'll concede you the point... As ridiculous as it is... That the CS somehow has a better than 1:1 ratio and therefor their massive 5,000,000+ combat force army is "logical"

I wasn't going for "logical," only "possible."
But thanks.

Anything is possible.

It's just really unlikely. There is a lot automations can do for refitting, rearming, and repairing to cut down but we aren't ever shown CS worker bots.

[Shark_Force]

having the tail be civilians or in another location doesn't magically make the tail disappear. it just means you're tracking it differently.

if you need 4 civilians for every regular soldier, that still comes up with some pretty ridiculous numbers.

[Killer Cyborg]

So... Since I can't (and I am not going to spend hours digging through things) find those numbers you want to source... I'll concede you the point... As ridiculous as it is... That the CS somehow has a better than 1:1 ratio and therefor their massive 5,000,000+ combat force army is "logical"

I wasn't going for "logical," only "possible."
But thanks.

Anything is possible.

It's just really unlikely. There is a lot automations can do for refitting, rearming, and repairing to cut down but we aren't ever shown CS worker bots.

Whatever composes the Tail, we aren't really shown it. Does that mean it doesn't exist?
We're not shown the majority of Rifts Earth.

[Axelmania]

One thing that does bother me about maintenance is that weirdness (I think in Canada) about snow or logs being able to inflict MD... which aside from traps mean that big natural stuff during everyday storms might also cause some wear and tear.

If a modern car's engine overheats, that could mean cracks or other damage to the engine itself. That's not going to happen with an MDC engine, unless the overheating is 100+ MDC.

Figure that's meant to be S, I can't even recall heat damage ever getting any decent focus. All sorts of "half damage from heat and fire" D-Bees out there, but while there's fire attacks I think we could probably count all locateable 'heat' attacks on one hand across all PB stuff.

-"Operator misuse and abuse" of vehicles is "a major cause of damage and breakdown." While MDC vehicles are by no means indestructible, they would be a heck of a lot harder to damage through normal misuse, abuse, or hijinks.

Medical staff would also be a lot lower since the vehicles would keep together during crashes, protecting them better, plus MDC armor also helps with that...

Plus like you said, for non-traumatic medical problems, the armor diagnostics probably give incredibly early warnings to intervene with stuff.

Of course... I don't know if they'd bother to spend the surgical resources to remove a tumor from a grunt... I think they would want to save those for immediate threats.

Long-term threats you could probably schedule a 'psychic surgery' with a Healing psychic from Psi-Net to come deal with it. The use of psionics for healing is probably a major money-saver since then you don't have to worry about the problems associated with opening holes in people since I get the impression this is based on that quacky "I'm pulling a chicken liver out of your stomach and saving it's a tumor" type stuff if it actually worked.

resorting to fully sapient AI, which the CS cannot do and the CCW will not do.

This could be where the Transgalactic Empire pulls ahead since they embrace the Machine People.

the new skelebot controller OCC who all have a personal assistant repair/salvage modded skelebot

First I have heard of this, anyone know what books it's in? Recent Rifter? WANT. Can they BUILD skelebots? Severe shortage of OCCs which simply build tech... still no skill for building missiles from scratch for example, and controlling missile production is a huge power balance thing. Even if you need a factor, what skill would you need for building a factory? Etc.

It sounds to me like you are the one who does not understand those things, so prehaps we should agree to disagree. We're at the point we are simply re-presenting our premise as our arguments, and that never goes anywhere.

You guys both make good points, arguments are good, what can happen sometimes is we read another's stance as more absolute/extreme than was intended leading to thinking the two to think they disagree to a greater degree than they actually do.

You have a good point about new illnesses, and environmental armor is no absolute defense if you have to remove it sometimes, unless you're getting a steam-bath for the outside of your armor before entering some sealed chamber, which I can only see being possible in giant vehicles like the Firestorm, so guys taking their helmets off inside a standard APC could get infected with something.

Looking at it, there are MANY military non-combat jobs that could be filled with robots.

It really comes down to costs though. I'm sure the CS can build these guys for hundreds of thousands instead of the millions it costs to buy them on the open market, but that's still probably a lot more than it would cost to feed a human from infancy to adulthood and train them to do the skill.

Especially since the CS doesn't actually have to foot that bill, the parents would, refugees come ready-built and just need to get specific occupation training.

We would just have to compare the ongoing costs of feeding humans vs (in addition to the initial purchase price) how much it costs to replace the nuclear engine of a robot every few years.

Vehicles may not suffer wear and tear but they still break down when struck by an MDC weapon. The radios aren't MDC either. Armor has holes that need to be patched.

Aren't there radios built into MDC armor or vehicles? There might be MDC radios too, even if we aren't told about them, can't be that hard to put some MDC plating around a radio.

You're right about the armor, although a lot of the threats the CS faces are monsters who rely on supernatural strength so I think the CS would have a very 'retreat and control the range' strategy with their high-speed vehicles to maximize the benefit of their long-range energy weapons and minimize the amount of repairs that need to be done. They could also hire out operator mercs to do patches.

Literacy isn't needed but you need a lot of people to run propaganda, not to mention produce content, especially since you can't let them do it themselves without monitoring it.

Joseph II would certainly have a dedicated video department, but I bet he could get by with as much as the WWE Network uses. People in Rifts Earth are probably very busy and only need to watch propaganda occasionally. People who believe in the mission don't need as much coddling as those who are dis-satified.

You also need an entertainment department for the military. People forget that such is a thing. USO shows and such take, and require, military personnel.

True, while there are traveling circuses they could probably be a security risk to watch up-close. With greater communications technology the costs are cut down though. Compare how in the mid 20th century you had to go to pay for tickets to wrestling shows, travel to them, etc. With WWF in the 80s, WCW in the 90s, consolidated WWE in the early 2000s, TNA in the late 2000s, ROH/NJPW in the 2010s, now all of this stuff is just available on cable TV subscriptions, and CS would have even better distribution than this, so they could entertain THE MILLIONS with ~50 entertainers. They just wouldn't be traveling a lot (too dangerous, expensive) and do most shows in-house like how NXT does, or what TNA used to do.

You need non-combat personnel to look through every single letter sent home by every single soldier to redact every single mention of something the military doesn't want leaked. (That we know is a thing because of the fiction from the SoT series concerning letters from the front.)

Most messages home would be audio (maybe video) messages and probably easier to edit, have some guy with a clicker to bleep out certain statistics or location names.

You might even be able to program software to listen for certain words and ping them for a human to oversight. Doesn't the NSA do something like this already? CS would be even better at it. Clairvoyants in Psi-Net could probably also predict leaks and zero in on their origins to intervene in time.

You also need accountants, to pay people. Beurocratic the catalog material. You need a lot of people for every fighting man.

Accounting could probably be mostly automated. This is probably the case even today except they're slow to change over and more distrusting of tech than the CS would be.

PTSD might well be higher in Rifts Earth than it is now, so they might need more shrinks.

"might" LOL this has probably been the primary medical problem for CS soldiers in the past century once environmental armor became standard issue. This world would be so terrifying that many would be driven to suicide from the sense of paranoia and ennui.

Military service is probably a major focus for all these feelings. A bunch of terrified humans think "well, if life sucks so much I'd rather off myself, I may as well die in service of my country" and then for those who manage to survive, the sense of fear begins to lessen because they are able to exert master over these threats, are able to be protected from them via Psi-Net, are able to find others sharing their fears and being brave for each other.

All Psi-Net agents (WB10 page 195) have Lore: Psychic (page 66) meaning they may have a passing knowledge about myths/legends of the Dreamstream. Cumulatively this means the CS probably does know about it.

Even if GMs say that Rifts character can only have psionics from Rifts books (so no selecting Dreamdance: Minor as a Sensitive) you don't really need it, you can get there using normal Rifts abilities. Page 44 of Between the Shadows mentions that you just need to have telepathy (to get a vision of what someone is dreaming) and then can use astral projection to enter the dream pool.

This is more dangerous than dreamdance minor though. You'd only want to do this to sedated patients since waking up severs the astral cord. You'd also want to limit this to very tough psychics (bodybuilding wrestling, lots of SDC) so their astral/dream SDC would be very high so they could survive damage from any dream personas they need to beat up to cure the nightmares of CS troops.

Telepathy alone would probably be a better approach, since by seeing a patient's dreams it could help (save on the time that patients explain their dreams to you, just observe their dream in a sleep clinic) and would not incur the same risks.

CS Juicers who are also minor psionics with telepathy/astral projection would be great candidates. They would have loads of SDC to fight dream constructs, and even if they did get killed there, well, they weren't long for this Earth anyway. It would give them a great outlet for their energy and desire to fight for times when they need to be bunkered down.

I probably wouldn't want to give juicer conversions to valuable tele/AP combo sensitives but you could use them for those experimental Psi-Implants introduced in Psyscape. Although it might be considered a waste of money to put those expensive implants in a being who won't live long... I don't know if they are able to reuse the implants on a new person once a Juicer has his Last Call.

Robots can sing and dance at 94%.
VR computers could make up a lot of R&R and other entertainment as well.

"other entertainment" makes me wonder, the CS has laws against normal humans fraternizing with psychic ones (not sure if they care about what psi-stalkers and psi-hounds get up to since they're mutants and their aberrant hijinx would not compromise human purity) but what would CS attitudes be towards fraternizing with femme-bots? Inquiring Hideki Motosuwa-type CS grunts wish to know. That could be one way to keep up morale but might be considered too divergent from human tradition.

They are video letters and no, the CS probably can't make a computer that can do that. The computer would need a complex enough AI to understand context in human conversation. ARCHIE Three could do it, but you'd need a level well beyond what the CS has demonstrated.

You'd need a human for final judgment, but I don't think the CS needs a human to listen in on every single conversation, they can just intercede on ones of interest.

We already have computers which can convert the sounds of speech into words, I have voice recognition on my tablet for Google search for example. By doing this, the computer can simply log whenever certain words are spoken and those 'danger' words can be overviewed by a human.

Even if you did have a human reviewing every message home: by having a computer transcribe the audio into the written word, a literate psychic with Speed Reading could get through those logs very quickly.

Usually around 1/2 of your population are children (under the age of 18) or the elderly (over the age of 50) meaning if the CS has 45,000,000 people then we can safely assume that 22,500,000 people are fit to serve. So, using the incredibly low 1:2 those numbers still don't work.

Its not a really big deal. We always knew that NONE of the population numbers in Rifts work. They are always higher than they should be.

I thought you could enter CS army at 16... and children not in the army could still be helping with army support services away from the front lines. What age does Psi-Net start recruiting?

The elderly are also capable of providing support services, and serving in the army at higher ages due to stuff like exoskeletons and power armor. People live longer in the CS. Those who have served long term would be afforded higher medical care due to their value. Those who haven't proved as useful have probably died in service.

[HWalsh]

One thing that does bother me about maintenance is that weirdness (I think in Canada) about snow or logs being able to inflict MD... which aside from traps mean that big natural stuff during everyday storms might also cause some wear and tear.

If a modern car's engine overheats, that could mean cracks or other damage to the engine itself. That's not going to happen with an MDC engine, unless the overheating is 100+ MDC.

Figure that's meant to be S, I can't even recall heat damage ever getting any decent focus. All sorts of "half damage from heat and fire" D-Bees out there, but while there's fire attacks I think we could probably count all locateable 'heat' attacks on one hand across all PB stuff.

To counter this a bit, the CS would also need a lot more mechanics because they regularly face much more combat than (most) real world Military Forces generally do.

-"Operator misuse and abuse" of vehicles is "a major cause of damage and breakdown." While MDC vehicles are by no means indestructible, they would be a heck of a lot harder to damage through normal misuse, abuse, or hijinks.

Medical staff would also be a lot lower since the vehicles would keep together during crashes, protecting them better, plus MDC armor also helps with that...

Plus like you said, for non-traumatic medical problems, the armor diagnostics probably give incredibly early warnings to intervene with stuff.

Of course... I don't know if they'd bother to spend the surgical resources to remove a tumor from a grunt... I think they would want to save those for immediate threats.

Long-term threats you could probably schedule a 'psychic surgery' with a Healing psychic from Psi-Net to come deal with it. The use of psionics for healing is probably a major money-saver since then you don't have to worry about the problems associated with opening holes in people since I get the impression this is based on that quacky "I'm pulling a chicken liver out of your stomach and saving it's a tumor" type stuff if it actually worked.

Medical staff would actually be higher because vehicles would keep together during crashes. While you would think this would protect them better that isn't how vehicles are designed. Vehicles are designed to fail in specific ways to reduce force transferred. If the vehicle doesn't deform that imparts more not less force and stress onto the occupants.

The CS doesn't have anywhere near enough psychics to have all-psychic medical doctors. Remember Psychics are still a fairly new thing, and not wholly welcomed by the population.

resorting to fully sapient AI, which the CS cannot do and the CCW will not do.

This could be where the Transgalactic Empire pulls ahead since they embrace the Machine People.

the new skelebot controller OCC who all have a personal assistant repair/salvage modded skelebot

First I have heard of this, anyone know what books it's in? Recent Rifter? WANT. Can they BUILD skelebots? Severe shortage of OCCs which simply build tech... still no skill for building missiles from scratch for example, and controlling missile production is a huge power balance thing. Even if you need a factor, what skill would you need for building a factory? Etc.

It sounds to me like you are the one who does not understand those things, so prehaps we should agree to disagree. We're at the point we are simply re-presenting our premise as our arguments, and that never goes anywhere.

You guys both make good points, arguments are good, what can happen sometimes is we read another's stance as more absolute/extreme than was intended leading to thinking the two to think they disagree to a greater degree than they actually do.

You have a good point about new illnesses, and environmental armor is no absolute defense if you have to remove it sometimes, unless you're getting a steam-bath for the outside of your armor before entering some sealed chamber, which I can only see being possible in giant vehicles like the Firestorm, so guys taking their helmets off inside a standard APC could get infected with something.

Looking at it, there are MANY military non-combat jobs that could be filled with robots.

It really comes down to costs though. I'm sure the CS can build these guys for hundreds of thousands instead of the millions it costs to buy them on the open market, but that's still probably a lot more than it would cost to feed a human from infancy to adulthood and train them to do the skill.

Especially since the CS doesn't actually have to foot that bill, the parents would, refugees come ready-built and just need to get specific occupation training.

We would just have to compare the ongoing costs of feeding humans vs (in addition to the initial purchase price) how much it costs to replace the nuclear engine of a robot every few years.

Vehicles may not suffer wear and tear but they still break down when struck by an MDC weapon. The radios aren't MDC either. Armor has holes that need to be patched.

Aren't there radios built into MDC armor or vehicles? There might be MDC radios too, even if we aren't told about them, can't be that hard to put some MDC plating around a radio.

The "slap some MDC plating on it" doesn't really work as we have rules for dealing SDC damage to things. Drop the radio? Doesn't matter if the plating is MDC the insides take SD damage. Heck, I've had characters in-game who used that method to get armor before. Beat people with a lot of body throws until you kill the person inside with SD damage, then strip the completely unharmed MDC armor.

You're right about the armor, although a lot of the threats the CS faces are monsters who rely on supernatural strength so I think the CS would have a very 'retreat and control the range' strategy with their high-speed vehicles to maximize the benefit of their long-range energy weapons and minimize the amount of repairs that need to be done. They could also hire out operator mercs to do patches.

Unfortunately that isn't how the CS operates, we know that from a number of books that tell us what the CS uses for patrols. If I remember correctly, for example, the SoT books outlined a typical CS patrol as being: 4 Deadboys, 4 Dogboys, 1 Psi-Stalker, 6 Skelebots so a lot of encounters don't have vehicles and are fought on foot.

Literacy isn't needed but you need a lot of people to run propaganda, not to mention produce content, especially since you can't let them do it themselves without monitoring it.

Joseph II would certainly have a dedicated video department, but I bet he could get by with as much as the WWE Network uses. People in Rifts Earth are probably very busy and only need to watch propaganda occasionally. People who believe in the mission don't need as much coddling as those who are dis-satified.

Uh, no. We know that the CS propaganda department is based on the Nazi model. As such they would have nearly constant production of propaganda. You have to understand, it isn't about people who "believe in the mission" Axel. It is that "the mission" is very much a carefully hand-picked and presented set of "half-truths" and "outright lies" that has largely been able to capitalize on a lot of fortuitous and oddly convenient lucky breaks.

The problem, Axel, with propaganda based on half-truths like the kind the CS uses, is that the CS wants to keep people busy, has to keep people busy, and keep them distracted. If they don't, if people get the chance to start thinking about things, then the CS risks a total collapse. Joseph Prosek II knows this, and he knows how to play the CS citizens for suckers like a virtuoso with a Stradivarius.

You also need an entertainment department for the military. People forget that such is a thing. USO shows and such take, and require, military personnel.

True, while there are traveling circuses they could probably be a security risk to watch up-close. With greater communications technology the costs are cut down though. Compare how in the mid 20th century you had to go to pay for tickets to wrestling shows, travel to them, etc. With WWF in the 80s, WCW in the 90s, consolidated WWE in the early 2000s, TNA in the late 2000s, ROH/NJPW in the 2010s, now all of this stuff is just available on cable TV subscriptions, and CS would have even better distribution than this, so they could entertain THE MILLIONS with ~50 entertainers. They just wouldn't be traveling a lot (too dangerous, expensive) and do most shows in-house like how NXT does, or what TNA used to do.

They would have to. Remember the CS doesn't have satellites. Long distance video communication isn't easy. We know this for a fact because in SoT we are told that video letters had to be sent. Meaning that they weren't making video calls. You need that living element to appease troops. The troops need to see, and to a lesser extent "feel" what they are fighting for.

Even in the modern day, like, you know, 6 months ago, the WWE sent a live show to the troops rather than a video subscription. Video is good, but nothing beats live entertainment.

You need non-combat personnel to look through every single letter sent home by every single soldier to redact every single mention of something the military doesn't want leaked. (That we know is a thing because of the fiction from the SoT series concerning letters from the front.)

Most messages home would be audio (maybe video) messages and probably easier to edit, have some guy with a clicker to bleep out certain statistics or location names.

You might even be able to program software to listen for certain words and ping them for a human to oversight. Doesn't the NSA do something like this already? CS would be even better at it. Clairvoyants in Psi-Net could probably also predict leaks and zero in on their origins to intervene in time.

Clairvoyance isn't anywhere near good enough to be reliable. We know this because in one of the SoT books (Book 3 I think) the grunt completely circumvents the normal letter protocol to send a letter home with full non-redacted information.

As to the argument about them needing a guy with a clicker. The debate was about needing people to check them, thus "the tail" and so yes, that is all they need to do. The NSA has a flag system but that still requires human oversight on each flag, which, in practice, doesn't reduce manpower by much.

You also need accountants, to pay people. Beurocratic the catalog material. You need a lot of people for every fighting man.

Accounting could probably be mostly automated. This is probably the case even today except they're slow to change over and more distrusting of tech than the CS would be.

Oh no no no. Nonononono. Believe me, its not a matter of slow to change over. You need human oversight because while disbursement payments can be automated, you need living people to check them regularly to make sure no shenanigans are going on. This is doubly so if the kind of accounting we have is for material. An automated system, for example, isn't going to note anything suspicious of commonly lost equipment. However CS grunts can make a lot of money on the side by "losing" an e-clip once in a while.

"We ran into a group of deebees over the ridge and I had to change my e-clip, I must have dropped the expended one."

If its not too frequent (maybe once every 6 months or so) then its not going to flag suspicious, but that grunt can make a lot of extra "hazard pay" over a 4 year term that way.

PTSD might well be higher in Rifts Earth than it is now, so they might need more shrinks.

"might" LOL this has probably been the primary medical problem for CS soldiers in the past century once environmental armor became standard issue. This world would be so terrifying that many would be driven to suicide from the sense of paranoia and ennui.

Military service is probably a major focus for all these feelings. A bunch of terrified humans think "well, if life sucks so much I'd rather off myself, I may as well die in service of my country" and then for those who manage to survive, the sense of fear begins to lessen because they are able to exert master over these threats, are able to be protected from them via Psi-Net, are able to find others sharing their fears and being brave for each other.

All Psi-Net agents (WB10 page 195) have Lore: Psychic (page 66) meaning they may have a passing knowledge about myths/legends of the Dreamstream. Cumulatively this means the CS probably does know about it.

Even if GMs say that Rifts character can only have psionics from Rifts books (so no selecting Dreamdance: Minor as a Sensitive) you don't really need it, you can get there using normal Rifts abilities. Page 44 of Between the Shadows mentions that you just need to have telepathy (to get a vision of what someone is dreaming) and then can use astral projection to enter the dream pool.

This is more dangerous than dreamdance minor though. You'd only want to do this to sedated patients since waking up severs the astral cord. You'd also want to limit this to very tough psychics (bodybuilding wrestling, lots of SDC) so their astral/dream SDC would be very high so they could survive damage from any dream personas they need to beat up to cure the nightmares of CS troops.

Telepathy alone would probably be a better approach, since by seeing a patient's dreams it could help (save on the time that patients explain their dreams to you, just observe their dream in a sleep clinic) and would not incur the same risks.

CS Juicers who are also minor psionics with telepathy/astral projection would be great candidates. They would have loads of SDC to fight dream constructs, and even if they did get killed there, well, they weren't long for this Earth anyway. It would give them a great outlet for their energy and desire to fight for times when they need to be bunkered down.

I probably wouldn't want to give juicer conversions to valuable tele/AP combo sensitives but you could use them for those experimental Psi-Implants introduced in Psyscape. Although it might be considered a waste of money to put those expensive implants in a being who won't live long... I don't know if they are able to reuse the implants on a new person once a Juicer has his Last Call.

It is more than just dreams that are a problem. You don't want a soldier who's thought process is, "I might as well die in the service to my country." Nor do you want a soldier who is prone to, "I want to kill all them dangerous filthy deebees!" You want people who are balanced before you hand them an MD rifle.

Robots can sing and dance at 94%.
VR computers could make up a lot of R&R and other entertainment as well.

"other entertainment" makes me wonder, the CS has laws against normal humans fraternizing with psychic ones (not sure if they care about what psi-stalkers and psi-hounds get up to since they're mutants and their aberrant hijinx would not compromise human purity) but what would CS attitudes be towards fraternizing with femme-bots? Inquiring Hideki Motosuwa-type CS grunts wish to know. That could be one way to keep up morale but might be considered too divergent from human tradition.

The CS doesn't want CS people becoming too comfortable with robots. It is the same reason they don't want people too comfortable with Psi-Stalkers and Dogboys. They aren't human, and you are risking developing emotional attachments to something that isn't human. To the CS that is bad.

They are video letters and no, the CS probably can't make a computer that can do that. The computer would need a complex enough AI to understand context in human conversation. ARCHIE Three could do it, but you'd need a level well beyond what the CS has demonstrated.

You'd need a human for final judgment, but I don't think the CS needs a human to listen in on every single conversation, they can just intercede on ones of interest.

We already have computers which can convert the sounds of speech into words, I have voice recognition on my tablet for Google search for example. By doing this, the computer can simply log whenever certain words are spoken and those 'danger' words can be overviewed by a human.

Even if you did have a human reviewing every message home: by having a computer transcribe the audio into the written word, a literate psychic with Speed Reading could get through those logs very quickly.

That still requires manpower, and even moreso it requires a psychic with a very specific power.

Usually around 1/2 of your population are children (under the age of 18) or the elderly (over the age of 50) meaning if the CS has 45,000,000 people then we can safely assume that 22,500,000 people are fit to serve. So, using the incredibly low 1:2 those numbers still don't work.

Its not a really big deal. We always knew that NONE of the population numbers in Rifts work. They are always higher than they should be.

I thought you could enter CS army at 16... and children not in the army could still be helping with army support services away from the front lines. What age does Psi-Net start recruiting?

The elderly are also capable of providing support services, and serving in the army at higher ages due to stuff like exoskeletons and power armor. People live longer in the CS. Those who have served long term would be afforded higher medical care due to their value. Those who haven't proved as useful have probably died in service.

Even if we extend it to 16, and even if they let the elderly do it, it becomes a hard pill to swallow unless the CS somehow has managed to get to a better than 1:4 ratio. Note, again, the real world US has a 1:11 ratio and even the things Cyborg listed stated that the more technological a group gets the higher that ratio goes. Realistically, honestly, I'd be shocked if the CS could get to below a 1:8 and that is being very generous.

As it is the only possible way the numbers can work is if they somehow got to a 1:1 or a 1:0.5 or better, but that is ridiculous and a much better explanation is that Palladium simply didn't think about it.

[kaid]

Here's another link:

Cites modern US military Tooth to Tail as 1:11, WWI as 1:4, and Civil War (Union) as 1:3.


Oh, and here's another:
http://magiclougie.blogspot.com/2015/07 ... rfare.html

There's a concept called tooth-to-tail ratio, which is the ratio of soldiers directly involved in fighting missions (tooth) to those involved in supporting activities (tail). A typical ratio is about 1/3 tooth to 2/3 tail, which means that you're spending a lot of resources on logistics, supplies, and other efforts to support the actual combat operations.

According to Gen. Cole, the Army sees that as an opportunity to become more efficient:
"Maybe it’s one-half to one-half," he said. "The point is you get to keep more tooth, more folks that actually conduct operations on the ground and less supporting structure."
And one way of becoming more efficient is by using support robots—a trend we're seeing not only in the Army but other U.S. armed forces as well. Robots will likely include autonomous vehicles that can transport supplies, autonomous aircraft that can transport supplies, and other autonomous robots that can transport supplies (like the LS3 "robot mule," pictured below). As you may have noticed, there's a theme here, but most of those support robot programs are in the early stages and whether they'll prove effective, only time will tell.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122721015509345161

There have been military forces in history which had virtually no "tail" at all. Two notable examples of that are the Mongols and the Zulus. The Zulu army traveled on foot, and the soldiers carried only their spears and shields, because they would be fed by the local villagers wherever they were. The Mongol force was entirely mounted, but its horses could refuel on grass and the men mostly got their food by hunting or foraging.

One thing to note also is the amount of tail you need lowers drastically if you are not attempting to project force around the entire world but are only projecting force in basically your own home continent with most of that activity within an hour or two flight time to your capital city. Most of the tail is logistics when you are mostly operating in your own back yard your lines of logistics are incredibly short so a lot of the normal depot's and remote support structures simply don't exist. It is possible this becomes an issue for them if they branch out farther into north america and canada. Right now trying to compare current modern US tooth to tail vs a force basically operating out of their own cities is comparing apples to fish.

It is one reason you see things like during the civil war the tooth to tail ratios were much lower. When your armies can operate out of your own cities or the near vicinity you can make use of your civilian population to do stuff for the military so the trigger pullers dont have to.

[kaid]

Found an interesting article about this sort of stuff.
http://fas.org/man/congress/1997/cbo_army/chap_02.htm

Ratio of Support Personnel to Combat Personnel in Defense Analyses and Actual Conflicts
Conflict or Analysis Ratio
(Support personnel to combat personnel)
World War II 1.7 to 1

Korean War 1.5 to 1

Vietnam War 1.8 to 1

Persian Gulf Wara 1.4 to 1

Mobility Requirements Study Bottom-Up Review Update 1.8 to 1

Total Army Analysis 2003 2.5 to 1


And these are numbers for us supporting and maintaining militaries halfway across the planet.

[Pepsi Jedi]

having the tail be civilians or in another location doesn't magically make the tail disappear. it just means you're tracking it differently.

if you need 4 civilians for every regular soldier, that still comes up with some pretty ridiculous numbers.

Not really. 4 civilians for everyone in the military would give alot of civilians jobs when you have 9,000,000 under arms. Keep your economy going. Keep your army marching. And the 'exist' but jsut aren't 'army' and 'on the front lines. thus not included in the overall combat troop numbers.

[Library Ogre]

Another consideration is... who is the tooth? While the CS has some relatively safe places, pretty much any military job can become a combat position at a moment's notice.

[Killer Cyborg]

Looking at it, there are MANY military non-combat jobs that could be filled with robots.

It really comes down to costs though. I'm sure the CS can build these guys for hundreds of thousands instead of the millions it costs to buy them on the open market, but that's still probably a lot more than it would cost to feed a human from infancy to adulthood and train them to do the skill.

Especially since the CS doesn't actually have to foot that bill, the parents would, refugees come ready-built and just need to get specific occupation training.

We would just have to compare the ongoing costs of feeding humans vs (in addition to the initial purchase price) how much it costs to replace the nuclear engine of a robot every few years.

Actually, for a lot of bots you wouldn't need to replace a nuclear engine, if the CS is smart. Super Solar Engines can keep bots working just fine off of sunlight during daylight hours (and can store up to 8 hours worth of power. There are a lot of jobs that can be done outdoors, and only need to be done during the day.

Other bots could just have electric batteries that require recharging regularly, or (for the smaller ones) run off of e-clips or such.
Heck some of the ones working indoors could have power cords or be built into a building, or even just be the equivalent of a robotic brain plugged into the internet.
We're not talking about standard OCC-type Bots in many cases.

As for overall cost, one thing to keep in mind is that robots don't require paychecks, but humans do.
And robots are generally better than the vast majority of humans at most of their skills, which means they're likely to save a lot of costs from errors (and injuries, etc.)

Robots can sing and dance at 94%.
VR computers could make up a lot of R&R and other entertainment as well.

"other entertainment" makes me wonder, the CS has laws against normal humans fraternizing with psychic ones (not sure if they care about what psi-stalkers and psi-hounds get up to since they're mutants and their aberrant hijinx would not compromise human purity) but what would CS attitudes be towards fraternizing with femme-bots? Inquiring Hideki Motosuwa-type CS grunts wish to know. That could be one way to keep up morale but might be considered too divergent from human tradition.

The CS might overlook it, but I couldn't see them endorsing it.
Of course, there might be non-robot ways for technology to deal with that kind of thing.

[Killer Cyborg]

Another consideration is... who is the tooth? While the CS has some relatively safe places, pretty much any military job can become a combat position at a moment's notice.

Exactly.

[Killer Cyborg]

One thing to note also is the amount of tail you need lowers drastically if you are not attempting to project force around the entire world but are only projecting force in basically your own home continent with most of that activity within an hour or two flight time to your capital city. Most of the tail is logistics when you are mostly operating in your own back yard your lines of logistics are incredibly short so a lot of the normal depot's and remote support structures simply don't exist. It is possible this becomes an issue for them if they branch out farther into north america and canada. Right now trying to compare current modern US tooth to tail vs a force basically operating out of their own cities is comparing apples to fish.

It is one reason you see things like during the civil war the tooth to tail ratios were much lower. When your armies can operate out of your own cities or the near vicinity you can make use of your civilian population to do stuff for the military so the trigger pullers dont have to.

Definitely.
And while the CS does use wheeled transports, most of their stuff seems to not only fly, but fly fast enough to get from the "front" to a CS city in pretty short order.
The CS operates as a rule within CS territory, or so close to it that it nets out the same.

[Axelmania]

I'm not thinking the CS would let in super-imbalanced as a policy (though many seem to make it anyway so they can't be that stringent) but more like "why even try to be a farmer? A demon will eat me" mentalities could find military service a motivation "I'm not going to hide and cower, if death is coming I will face it!"

[Killer Cyborg]

the CS would also need a lot more mechanics because they regularly face much more combat than (most) real world Military Forces generally do.

Sure, but there's nothing saying that their mechanics aren't Tooth.
CS Technical Officers with the Mechanic MOS could be part of the regular combat troops, especially in MDC vehicles.
The Robotic MOS includes Pilot: Robots & Power Armor in addition to the skills required to repair robots and power armor. Who's to say that they're not used as combat pilots?

And any Grunt (and most other OCCs) can take at least Basic Mechanics and Auto Mechanics. With the right equipment, that might be all you need to repair most MDC damage to wheeled vehicles. Repairing armor on bots might not be much more difficult, assuming that it's only the armor that's damaged, not the internal workings.
EOD Specialists all have the Mechanical Engineer skill. They might swap between blowing stuff up on the front line, and in performing repairs in the motor pool.
CS Special Forces can have ANY Mechanical or Electrical skill. They're probably pretty self-sufficient when it comes to repairs, as a group.

Medical staff would actually be higher because vehicles would keep together during crashes. While you would think this would protect them better that isn't how vehicles are designed. Vehicles are designed to fail in specific ways to reduce force transferred. If the vehicle doesn't deform that imparts more not less force and stress onto the occupants.

You don't know what protections MDC vehicles have.
We DO know that somebody in MDC Body Armor is protected from impact damage to such a high degree that the rules for them taking any HP/SDC damage at all from a crash is Optional, and even if you use the optional rules, the damage overall is very low.
No, crashes would not require doctors, nor even medics.

RUE 356
A person in body armor or power armor who crashes takes 1d4 SDC/HP damage for every 20 mph above 50 mph.
Which means that if you're wearing your Dead Boy EBA, and you drive a car into a MDC wall at 69 mph, you suffer no damage.
At 70-89 mph, crashing into that wall means you take 1d4 SDC, for an average of 2.5 off of your SDC.
With non-professional treatment, an injured person recovers 2 HP and 4 SDC per day, which means that even if you bump yourself as hard as possible in an 89 mph crash into a wall, you'll be fully recovered from the minor bruises or aches.
At 90-109 mph, you take 2d4 SDC, for an average of 5 SDC damage. Slightly more than a day, you're cool again. Put some bactine on the owie, and go back to work.
At 110-129 mph, you take 3d4 SDC, for an average of 7.5 SDC damage. So that's like two days before you're fine again. Not that you're actually injured on any important level--SDC damage is defined as being the kind of stuff that doesn't impair function in any way. The average person has 19 SDC (not including any bonuses from skills or training or whatever), so you're not really having any problems.
At 130-149 mph, you take 4d4 SDC, for an average of 10 SDC. It's gotta sting, but no biggie.
At 150-169 mph, you take 5d4 SDC, for an average of 12.5 SDC. IF you're really unlucky, the maximum damage from the crash could inflict 20 SDC, and if you're an average person with 19 SDC, that would mean you take 1 HP worth of damage. So a maximum damage crash at 169 mph would start to actually be "serious."
Still, that 1 HP you'd be down would be healed up in half a day, and the rest would be healed up within 5 days... without any professional treatment.
At 170-189 mph, you take 6d4 SDC, for an average of 15 SDC.
At 190-209 mph, you take 7d4 SDC, for an average of 17.5 SDC.
At 210-229 mph, you take 8d4 SDC, for an average of 20 points of damage. At this speed, an average crash will result in the "serious" loss of 1 HP for an average person.
Of course, every single CS Grunt has the Body Building skill (+10 SDC) and Running (+1d6 SDC) so CS Grunts won't have to worry about an average crash at this speed. The average CS Grunt will have 32 SDC, not including any other Physical Skills he/she might have.
So for a Grunt, an average crash at up to 229 mph won't result in "serious" injury.
The worst-case scenario for a CS Grunt who crashes at 229 mph is a maximum damage of 32 SDC, exactly the SDC that he/she happens to have. One more point of damage, and it would have been serious. Whew. Close one.
At 230-249 mph, you take 9d4 SDC, for an average of 22.5 SDC.
At 250-269 mph, you take 10d4 SDC, for an average of 25 SDC.
At 270-289 mph, you take 11d4 SDC, for an average of 27.5 SDC.
At 290-309 mph, you take 12d4 SDC, for an average of 30 SDC... which is still less than the SDC of a basic CS Grunt. It would take 8 days of non-professional treatment to recover that much lost SDC, and the Grunt would be perfectly functional in the meanwhile: Slap on some band-aids, take some Ibuprofen, and keep on moving.

A maximum damage crash at 309 mph would mean 48 SDC damage, enough to knock out an average basic Grunt's SDC, AND inflict 16 HP worth of damage.
At first level, an average CS Grunt is going to have a PE of 11.5 (10.5+1 for Running), and their HP will equal PE+1d6, which comes out to an average of 15 HP.
So if your average CS Grunt with no extra Physical Skills boosting his PE or SDC crashes at 300 mph while wearing his body armor, and IF he's unlucky enough to take maximum damage from the crash, he'd be knocked down to -1 HP, which is Coma Time in Rifts.
That's pretty bad, but it'd also be pretty darned rare.

And if he successfully rolls with impact, even that damage would be cut in half, knocking it down to 24, and he could just dust himself off and get back to whatever he was doing, knowing that he doesn't need to see a doctor; he'll be 100% again in 8 days, just taking care of the issue himself.

Again, assuming that the GM is using the Optional rules for this kind of damage in the first place.

The CS doesn't have anywhere near enough psychics to have all-psychic medical doctors. Remember Psychics are still a fairly new thing, and not wholly welcomed by the population.

SB1 12
Psychics officially make up 12% of the CS population, and unofficially make up more like 17% of the population.
(Not counting Dog Boys, who are all psychic).
ine People.

The "slap some MDC plating on it" doesn't really work as we have rules for dealing SDC damage to things. Drop the radio? Doesn't matter if the plating is MDC the insides take SD damage.

We have Optional rules for people in MDC armor taking SDC damage from crashes and such.
But they're optional.
It's possible that MDC armor on a radio would have the same effect, in which case the radio wouldn't need repairs very often.
It's also possible that they have MDC radios, not just SDC radios with MDC armor.

Heck, I've had characters in-game who used that method to get armor before. Beat people with a lot of body throws until you kill the person inside with SD damage, then strip the completely unharmed MDC armor.

Well, the (optional) damage for being thrown while wearing MDC armor is probably 1 SDC per 20'.
So yeah, if you thrown an average person a total of 600', you'd inflict enough damage to take out 19 SDC and 11 HP, knocking the wearer into a coma.
I don't know that I'd use that method very often, though.

It was easier back in the day when the RMB was the rulebook, and the SDC damage wasn't just optional.
Then the damage was 1 point per 10', so throwing/falling could kill a lot easier.
What we did was use high-speed crashes, because back then it did 1d4 damage per 10 mph over 30 mph.
An average CS Grunt at first level had 35 SDC and 15 HP, so you only needed to do 50 damage total to drop them, which only took an average crash speed of 230 mph.
Unless they Rolled With Impact, of course.

Literacy isn't needed but you need a lot of people to run propaganda, not to mention produce content, especially since you can't let them do it themselves without monitoring it.

Joseph II would certainly have a dedicated video department, but I bet he could get by with as much as the WWE Network uses. People in Rifts Earth are probably very busy and only need to watch propaganda occasionally. People who believe in the mission don't need as much coddling as those who are dis-satified.

Uh, no. We know that the CS propaganda department is based on the Nazi model. As such they would have nearly constant production of propaganda. You have to understand, it isn't about people who "believe in the mission" Axel. It is that "the mission" is very much a carefully hand-picked and presented set of "half-truths" and "outright lies" that has largely been able to capitalize on a lot of fortuitous and oddly convenient lucky breaks.

I agree that the CS would have a LOT of people working propaganda.
That would be perhaps the bulk of the Tail, unless perhaps it was composed of Teeth working double-duty somehow.

You also need an entertainment department for the military. People forget that such is a thing. USO shows and such take, and require, military personnel.

True, while there are traveling circuses they could probably be a security risk to watch up-close. With greater communications technology the costs are cut down though. Compare how in the mid 20th century you had to go to pay for tickets to wrestling shows, travel to them, etc. With WWF in the 80s, WCW in the 90s, consolidated WWE in the early 2000s, TNA in the late 2000s, ROH/NJPW in the 2010s, now all of this stuff is just available on cable TV subscriptions, and CS would have even better distribution than this, so they could entertain THE MILLIONS with ~50 entertainers. They just wouldn't be traveling a lot (too dangerous, expensive) and do most shows in-house like how NXT does, or what TNA used to do.

They would have to. Remember the CS doesn't have satellites. Long distance video communication isn't easy. We know this for a fact because in SoT we are told that video letters had to be sent. Meaning that they weren't making video calls. You need that living element to appease troops. The troops need to see, and to a lesser extent "feel" what they are fighting for.

Even in the modern day, like, you know, 6 months ago, the WWE sent a live show to the troops rather than a video subscription. Video is good, but nothing beats live entertainment.[/quote]

Sure.
Then again, I'm pretty sure we didn't have the WWE or the USO during the Civil or Revolutionary wars.
It's not something that's necessary for every army.

You need non-combat personnel to look through every single letter sent home by every single soldier to redact every single mention of something the military doesn't want leaked. (That we know is a thing because of the fiction from the SoT series concerning letters from the front.)

Most messages home would be audio (maybe video) messages and probably easier to edit, have some guy with a clicker to bleep out certain statistics or location names.

You might even be able to program software to listen for certain words and ping them for a human to oversight. Doesn't the NSA do something like this already? CS would be even better at it. Clairvoyants in Psi-Net could probably also predict leaks and zero in on their origins to intervene in time.

Clairvoyance isn't anywhere near good enough to be reliable. We know this because in one of the SoT books (Book 3 I think) the grunt completely circumvents the normal letter protocol to send a letter home with full non-redacted information.[/quote]

What Clairvoyance would be good at is at combining to help prevent catastrophic attacks on the CS, because the CS has enough psychics that any massive attack would trigger countless visions before the event.
But it wouldn't be good for stuff like letter-scanning, I agree.

As to the argument about them needing a guy with a clicker. The debate was about needing people to check them, thus "the tail" and so yes, that is all they need to do. The NSA has a flag system but that still requires human oversight on each flag, which, in practice, doesn't reduce manpower by much.

It does reduce it, and the software to scan for stuff would be a lot (roughly 100x) better than what we have now.
Also, it's another situation where some of the Teeth could perform Tail duty.

You also need accountants, to pay people. Beurocratic the catalog material. You need a lot of people for every fighting man.

Accounting could probably be mostly automated. This is probably the case even today except they're slow to change over and more distrusting of tech than the CS would be.

Oh no no no. Nonononono. Believe me, its not a matter of slow to change over. You need human oversight because while disbursement payments can be automated, you need living people to check them regularly to make sure no shenanigans are going on. This is doubly so if the kind of accounting we have is for material. An automated system, for example, isn't going to note anything suspicious of commonly lost equipment. However CS grunts can make a lot of money on the side by "losing" an e-clip once in a while.

"We ran into a group of deebees over the ridge and I had to change my e-clip, I must have dropped the expended one."

If its not too frequent (maybe once every 6 months or so) then its not going to flag suspicious, but that grunt can make a lot of extra "hazard pay" over a 4 year term that way.

If the CS can program a robot to be a Lawyer, they can program a computer to be an Accountant.
Yeah, they'd still need some humans in there, for the reasons you say, but I don't think that it'd be a large number of them.

Usually around 1/2 of your population are children (under the age of 18) or the elderly (over the age of 50) meaning if the CS has 45,000,000 people then we can safely assume that 22,500,000 people are fit to serve. So, using the incredibly low 1:2 those numbers still don't work.

Part of the problem is that when Palladium says "population," we don't know entirely what they mean by that word, and it may vary.
It may or may not include children.
It may or may not--when dealing with the CS--include the military.
It may or may not--when dealing with the CS--include D-Bees and other non-humans.
And it may or may not be used to mean the exact same thing from book to book, and/or region to region.

[kaid]

Another consideration is... who is the tooth? While the CS has some relatively safe places, pretty much any military job can become a combat position at a moment's notice.

I think this is one reason I find the numbers listed at least somewhat believable. Other than the fortress cities proper there really are no safe zones for "non combatants" in the field. Stuff can appear out of literally nowhere and attack any place at about any time. Even Chi town is not immune to this it is just that they have hyper aggressive fast reaction squads to overkill anything that does pop up that they find.

It is why I think the North korean total militarization mode is probably closer to what they have than the current US military. The states such as it is is pretty much designed around its military and supplying it and in a world where monsters are real that is not an unreasonable thing for states to do.

[Shark_Force]

i don't think the CS would trust a computer to handle tasks that would require a human today without full human supervision anyways... in which case, why not just have the human handle it in the first place, since the computer can't do it faster than the human can handle if the oversight is to accomplish anything.

the CS doesn't seem to be very trusting of artificial intelligence. and any intelligence smart enough to grasp the hidden meanings in letters reliably is going to basically need to be able to think like a human, so i just can't imagine them trusting that kind of sensitive job to artificial intelligence either.

[eliakon]

Another consideration is... who is the tooth? While the CS has some relatively safe places, pretty much any military job can become a combat position at a moment's notice.

I think this is one reason I find the numbers listed at least somewhat believable. Other than the fortress cities proper there really are no safe zones for "non combatants" in the field. Stuff can appear out of literally nowhere and attack any place at about any time. Even Chi town is not immune to this it is just that they have hyper aggressive fast reaction squads to overkill anything that does pop up that they find.

It is why I think the North korean total militarization mode is probably closer to what they have than the current US military. The states such as it is is pretty much designed around its military and supplying it and in a world where monsters are real that is not an unreasonable thing for states to do.

Which also means that the modern "Tooth and tail" concept is going to be a bit off.
If your traning every mechanic, every medic, every transport driver to be a fully trained soldier, gearing them as a soldier...
Then you might have them in the numbers presented as soldiers. Meaning that the general "five million soldiers" or "nine millions soldiers" doesn't mean just combat arms guys that will go out and shoot... It means every single person doing every single job in the entire military.
And I would remind you that apparently the Military for example provides the law enforcement for the entire nation.
Netset? Yep, that falls under the military too.
Of course the number falls apart if you try and make it something it isn't
It IS a total military size, it is NOT their combat arms size.
In our world if a country says "we have X soldiers" we do not assume that they mean that they have X combat troops ready to fight, and that all the support, logistics, C3, etc are 'extra' on top of that...

The entire "what is the tooth to tail" ratio of the CS does not tell us how many MORE troops they have to get... it tells u what percentage of the current troops are support.

If we take the 5,000,000 man military and plug in the various ratios ( 1:1, 1:2, 3:7, 2:11, 1:11, 1:4... basically the numbers that have been floated) we get (I will use "tooth" for combat arms and the like and "tail" for all support/ non-combat arms)
1:1 2,500,000 Tooth and 2,500,000 Tail
1:2 1,666,666 Tooth and 3,333,333 Tail
3:7 1,500,000 Tooth and 3,500,000 Tail
1:4 1,000,000 Tooth and 4,000,000 Tail
2:11 769,230 Tooth and 4,230,769 Tail
1:11 416,666 Tooth and 4,583,333 Tail

Considering that the US was able to do 1:1 with our much lower cold war era technology and that we have round about zero slaves and zero robots to assist... I feel pretty safe in thinking the CS can do that as well.

[Killer Cyborg]

i don't think the CS would trust a computer to handle tasks that would require a human today without full human supervision anyways...
in which case, why not just have the human handle it in the first place, since the computer can't do it faster than the human can handle if the oversight is to accomplish anything.

the CS doesn't seem to be very trusting of artificial intelligence. and any intelligence smart enough to grasp the hidden meanings in letters reliably is going to basically need to be able to think like a human, so i just can't imagine them trusting that kind of sensitive job to artificial intelligence either.

Not all computers are Artificial Intelligence.
The computer doesn't have to be smart enough to grasp the hidden meanings in the letters, only to recognize suspicious patterns.

Although yeah, they could also have AIs doing some of the sorting.

Wither way, I think that the CS would definitely want humans supervising the AIs, but not on the level of "watching everything that the AI does, all the time, and going back over it himself."
More along the lines of monitoring things in case something goes wrong or seems odd somehow.
And one supervisor could (as supervisors tend to do) supervise more than one "worker."

[Killer Cyborg]

Another consideration is... who is the tooth? While the CS has some relatively safe places, pretty much any military job can become a combat position at a moment's notice.

I think this is one reason I find the numbers listed at least somewhat believable. Other than the fortress cities proper there really are no safe zones for "non combatants" in the field. Stuff can appear out of literally nowhere and attack any place at about any time. Even Chi town is not immune to this it is just that they have hyper aggressive fast reaction squads to overkill anything that does pop up that they find.

It is why I think the North korean total militarization mode is probably closer to what they have than the current US military. The states such as it is is pretty much designed around its military and supplying it and in a world where monsters are real that is not an unreasonable thing for states to do.

Which also means that the modern "Tooth and tail" concept is going to be a bit off.
If your traning every mechanic, every medic, every transport driver to be a fully trained soldier, gearing them as a soldier...
Then you might have them in the numbers presented as soldiers. Meaning that the general "five million soldiers" or "nine millions soldiers" doesn't mean just combat arms guys that will go out and shoot... It means every single person doing every single job in the entire military.
And I would remind you that apparently the Military for example provides the law enforcement for the entire nation.
Netset? Yep, that falls under the military too.
Of course the number falls apart if you try and make it something it isn't
It IS a total military size, it is NOT their combat arms size.
In our world if a country says "we have X soldiers" we do not assume that they mean that they have X combat troops ready to fight, and that all the support, logistics, C3, etc are 'extra' on top of that...

The entire "what is the tooth to tail" ratio of the CS does not tell us how many MORE troops they have to get... it tells u what percentage of the current troops are support.

If we take the 5,000,000 man military and plug in the various ratios ( 1:1, 1:2, 3:7, 2:11, 1:11, 1:4... basically the numbers that have been floated) we get (I will use "tooth" for combat arms and the like and "tail" for all support/ non-combat arms)
1:1 2,500,000 Tooth and 2,500,000 Tail
1:2 1,666,666 Tooth and 3,333,333 Tail
3:7 1,500,000 Tooth and 3,500,000 Tail
1:4 1,000,000 Tooth and 4,000,000 Tail
2:11 769,230 Tooth and 4,230,769 Tail
1:11 416,666 Tooth and 4,583,333 Tail

Considering that the US was able to do 1:1 with our much lower cold war era technology and that we have round about zero slaves and zero robots to assist... I feel pretty safe in thinking the CS can do that as well.

Good post.

[Shark_Force]

Not all computers are Artificial Intelligence.
The computer doesn't have to be smart enough to grasp the hidden meanings in the letters, only to recognize suspicious patterns.

Although yeah, they could also have AIs doing some of the sorting.

Wither way, I think that the CS would definitely want humans supervising the AIs, but not on the level of "watching everything that the AI does, all the time, and going back over it himself."
More along the lines of monitoring things in case something goes wrong or seems odd somehow.
And one supervisor could (as supervisors tend to do) supervise more than one "worker."

if you want your computer to understand when to flag a letter for censoring and when to not flag it, and do it with any degree of reliability, it's going to need to understand language the way a human understands language.

and for that, it's pretty much going to need a human intelligence. not just to be as intelligent as a human, mind you, but to actually be intelligent in the same way that a human is intelligent. being just as smart but having an alien mindset won't fix much at all.

[Natasha]

Historically, in our experience, the tail grows with technology.

I think it was pointed out that teeth to tail for overseas units have artifically smaller tails. In the case of the Korean War, for instance, that was certainly true; the tail grows if you account for all the American forces stationed in Japan. On the other hand, the tail also grew in Europe during the Cold War because many soldiers' had their families with them.

So it really just depends on how you organise your military. Some units are always a part of the tail. Military intelligence, many military police units, quartermaster, transport, medical, military justice, and so on. Even if a driver or pilot is his own mechanic, not all tasks flow seamlessly between being tooth or tail.

Although I think that the arguement that the in-country tail is larger than the foreign tail is certainly correct, I think that picking the most efficient a military can achieve based on our historical experience seems arbitrary. Ultimately, there are just too many unknowns that have to be made up to even write down a teeth to tail ratio.

[HWalsh]

Considering that the US was able to do 1:1 with our much lower cold war era technology and that we have round about zero slaves and zero robots to assist... I feel pretty safe in thinking the CS can do that as well.

Not quite legitimate of a claim. The cold war wasn't conventional and the "tooth" and "tail" were really different. CIA ops, for example, or situations where the CIA ran tail position skew the numbers. Also tons of ops were handled with non-US assets.

It also had no active deployment.

The CS is not in a cold war position.

A cold war example would be:

The CS sends the NGR 30,000 troops that are tended to by the NGR. So the tooth to tail is low because the NGR is taking over tail duties.

[Axelmania]

What Clairvoyance would be good at is at combining to help prevent catastrophic attacks on the CS, because the CS has enough psychics that any massive attack would trigger countless visions before the event.
But it wouldn't be good for stuff like letter-scanning, I agree.

I was only saying if someone was using an audio letter to reveal extremely sensitive information that could put the CS at risk, it might warn about it before the letter made its way to a vulnerable place.

i don't think the CS would trust a computer to handle tasks that would require a human today without full human supervision anyways... in which case, why not just have the human handle it in the first place, since the computer can't do it faster than the human can handle if the oversight is to accomplish anything.

the CS doesn't seem to be very trusting of artificial intelligence. and any intelligence smart enough to grasp the hidden meanings in letters reliably is going to basically need to be able to think like a human, so i just can't imagine them trusting that kind of sensitive job to artificial intelligence either.

A computer wouldn't be able to catch hidden meanings or coded language, I'm just talking about blatent trigger words, like NSA scanning phone conversations for "bomb" or however it goes, except the CS would probably have a different prioritization of trigger words. It might also vary on the mission.

The idea is that in cases where the CS doesn't have enough manpower to read every single letter, a computer which transcribes it and reports on keywords could prioritize which letters to review first, and which ones could be filed away for later review if necessary.

Sure it means some stuff could slip through, but that's always a risk even with human oversight, since not all humans catch all hidden meanings anyway.

Even if you had a person review every letter-vid a computer transcription helps due to accelerating reading via Speed Readers (plus I think Total Recall also works on the written word but not on heard speech) and it could through keyword-counting tell you which letters might benefit from 2 readers instead of one, or better analysts.

In cases where they don't get around to spotting leaked info in a letter in time: they could always notice it later and then go send Psi-Net mind-wipe the family member who received the letter. Even if they receive critical info, most CS family would not be in a rush to leak that information because they don't want to be branded traitors and lose their precious citizenship.

Obviously letters sent to non-citizens (I don't even know if you're allowed to contact the 'Burbs) would be under higher scrutiny since anyone receiving sensitive info there would have less incentive to keep it secret (no citizenship to lose, lots of Black Market to deal with)

Family who love the soldier who leaks info would probably also not want to spread the info because that could also get THEM in trouble.

In fact a lot of people would probably contact the proper CS authorities and notify them of the slip, to demonstrate their loyalty and get brownie points, showing how trustworthy they are. This might result in some punishment for the soldier (plus whoever codes the computer analysis, or anyone who might have reviewed the letter and let it pass) but if there was no ill will behind it, probably not career-ending since the CS could be understanding that they could be exhausted and emotional and not guard their tongue perfectly. I think in the long run it is of benefit for the Grunt since it shows that their choice of family is trustworthy and loyal to the CS.

[jaymz]

Not for nothing guys but in a setting like Rifts...if the tooth to tail ratio is your hang up you just might be playing the wrong game.

[Axelmania]

It won't be the wrong game once we finally get Rifts Farming. Rifts could be this

[Pepsi Jedi]

Not all computers are Artificial Intelligence.
The computer doesn't have to be smart enough to grasp the hidden meanings in the letters, only to recognize suspicious patterns.

Although yeah, they could also have AIs doing some of the sorting.

Wither way, I think that the CS would definitely want humans supervising the AIs, but not on the level of "watching everything that the AI does, all the time, and going back over it himself."
More along the lines of monitoring things in case something goes wrong or seems odd somehow.
And one supervisor could (as supervisors tend to do) supervise more than one "worker."

if you want your computer to understand when to flag a letter for censoring and when to not flag it, and do it with any degree of reliability, it's going to need to understand language the way a human understands language.

and for that, it's pretty much going to need a human intelligence. not just to be as intelligent as a human, mind you, but to actually be intelligent in the same way that a human is intelligent. being just as smart but having an alien mindset won't fix much at all.

Not at all. We've got computers in facilities out west that do this already with phone calls and emails and stuff.

And not for nothing. Noone's going to be sending 'Letters' in the CS. It'll be voice text sort of things anyway. Voice recongintion is viable in 2016. My phone can do it. Computers from the "Golden age of science' Can do it better.